‘I cannot be prouder of my players’ Arteta praises players despite FA Cup defeat to Manchester United | OneFootball

Mikel Arteta says he could not be prouder of the performance from his players despite back-to-back cup defeats.

Arsenal bow out of the FA Cup at the Third Round, meaning the Gunners have not managed to progress further than the Fourth Round in the five years since they last won the competition.

The Gunners lost 5-3 on penalties to Manchester United despite the visitors being down to ten men for half of the match. Bruno Fernandes had but Ruben Amorim’s side in front in the first half with a superb finish into the top corner, before the hosts rallied after Diogo Dalot’s sending off to equalise through Gabriel.

From then until the final whistle of extra time, Arteta’s side were in control, but will rue Martin Odegaard’s penalty miss in normal time and Kai Havertz’s misses throughout the match.

Despite this, Arteta says his players have made him proud for the effort they have put in against two tough opponents:

“Incredible how you don’t win that game, that’s basically to sum up,” Arteta said. “The dominance, the superiority in relation to the opposition and everything that we did to try to win the game and that’s it we didn’t get what we deserved clearly.

“But there is an element that is about putting the ball in the back of the net that we did once and the amount of situations chances, penalties that we had we didn’t.

“We go home extremely sad but I cannot be prouder of my players, the team, the individual collectively what they produced on Wednesday against two top teams it’s incredible.

“But we haven’t got rewarded and that’s the downside too.”